“My priority right now is to experience being young. A lot of my life, I haven’t gotten to do that.”
AS TOLD TO KAITLYN GREENIDGE AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO SORRENTI; STYLING BY BEAT BOLLIGER
Alexander McQueen gown with belt and biker boots. PHOTO: MARIO SORRENTI
At 21 years old, Harper’s Bazaar Icon Leila Mottley has achieved the kind of publishing success most writers only dream of. (To read more about Bazaar’s 2023 Icons, including cover stars Doja Cat, Kendall Jenner, and Paul Mescal, click here.)
The first draft of her debut novel, Nightcrawling, was written in the summer of 2019, just after Mottley graduated from high school. Three years later, Mottley’s tale of a Black teenager in East Oakland, California, submerged in a life of gentrification, corruption, and abuse was a New York Times bestseller, selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her the youngest person ever nominated for the award.
Now 21, Mottley has often been described as wise beyond her years. But the true power of her storytelling comes from just how acutely attuned she is to what it means to be young right now.
My work is propelled by the idea of silences and what it looks like to lean into discomfort and into the spaces that we are afraid to talk about. I find a lot of purpose and power in exploring those stories. My urgency often comes from the idea that we only grow and evolve when we’re uncomfortable.
I just turned 21. My priority right now is to experience being young. A lot of my life, I haven’t gotten to do that. Allowing myself freedom is one thing that I am working on. It looks like making choices for myself that are about my own experiences of joy, even grief, and pure, deep feeling. A lot of my life, I was learning how to disregard myself. Right now, I’m working on leading with myself and thinking of that as a practice of liberation.
“We only grow and evolve when we’re uncomfortable.”
I’m still not sure what I want to do with my life. Writing for me has just always been a constant. I didn’t think of it as a profession until it happened, really. My dad had a day job, but he would come home late at night and get on his old computer and write plays. I learned as a child that writing was something you can do just because of a pure gravitational pull. It can be just for you. Nightcrawling is the third novel that I wrote, but the first that I published. I didn’t let anyone read the other two. In five years, I hope I will have written a few more books, but books I feel really strongly about—that I don’t ever feel ambivalent about my work.
I experienced a lot of dissonance between what I believed about myself and my work and what was possible and what I was seeing happen. It was confusing for me, having writing be so much more than just the thing that I loved—and that I continue to love so deeply. I couldn’t survive without it. Since the book came out, my art and my passion has also become my job. I’ve been contending with what it looks like to step away from writing as a job and step back into it as a creative practice. I’m working on that. I was always very clear that there wasn’t a version of my world where I didn’t write. But there were versions of my world where it wasn’t my job. I’m super grateful that it is now my job.
[Publishing] Nightcrawling has been a practice of letting go and of relief. I’ve learned a lot about what it looks like for me to hold my own power and to not be swayed by the world around me, to look at every choice I make as an intention. I really want to create a life that includes things that I do that are not related to profit and not related to anyone else’s satisfaction.
This interview and photo shoot were conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Hair: Tomo Jidai for Oribe; makeup: Frank B for LoveSeen; manicures: Lisa Jachno for Dior Vernis; production: Calum Walsh for North Six; set design: Philipp Haemmerle
